This episode of podmissum features Dean of Harvard Divinity School David Hempton. Named the outstanding teacher of the year in 2008, he was recently granted a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities and has given the F.D. Maurice Lecture at King’s College London and the Cadbury Lecture at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. Prior to his appointment at Harvard in the spring of 2007, Hempton was a professor of christianity at Boston University and director of the School of History at Queen’s University Belfast. At Harvard’s Divinity School, he has encouraged more discourse with the Arts and Sciences faculty leading to a broader intellectual dialogue on religion.

Hempton studies evangelicalism on a global scale, with a focus on the early modern period. He has written numerous books and articles; his latest titles include Methodism: Empire of the Spirit (Yale, 2005), Evangelical Disenchantment (Yale, 2008), and The Church in the Long Eighteenth Century (Tauris, 2011). He is currently working on a study of the secularization of Europe and America from the eighteenth-century to the present day.

Dean Hempton was invited to speak at Trinity on the morning of 11 September 2014 at the opening Upper School Chapel of the 2014-2015 academic year. He is introduced by Calista Lee ’11 and after his talk there is a brief question and answer period with Upper School students.

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